Lucullus: The Life and Campaigns of a Roman Conqueror

By Lee Fratantuono

The military achievements of Lucius Licinius Lucullus (118-57/56 B.C.) have been the subject of admiration and great respect throughout the history of the study of warfare. Yet there have been few studies dedicated to a comprehensive examination of exactly how Lucullus conquered the Roman East and made it a more or less cohesive part of the empire. Lee Frantantuono considers every aspect of Lucullus life, starting with the training and education of a future Roman officer, but the greatest emphasis is on his military strategy and tactics during the Third Mithridatic War and his military adventures in Armenia. His most famous achievement was his victory against immense odds at the land battle of Tigranocerta. We are also reminded that he one of the most formidable naval strategists of the Roman Republic. Lucullus complicated relationship with Sulla and Crassus is explored and the study concludes with the retirement of the man Pliny the Elder memorably referred to as 'Xerxes in a Toga', a patron of the arts and master of a life of horticulture and reflection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473883628

Lee Fratantuono

Dr Lee Frantantuono is a Professor of Classics at Ohio Wesleyan University. His other works include 'The Battle of Actium 31 BC' (Pen & Sword Books, 2016) and 'Roman Conquests: Mesopotamia and Arabia' (Pen & Sword Books, 2021).

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Preface and Acknowledgements

The present volume is one of a relatively small number of books devoted to the Roman republican military and political figure Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Among these titles, the most extensive scholarly treatment of Lucullus is that of Arthur Peter Keaveney, Lucullus, a Life, which was originally published in 1992 by Routledge. A second edition from Gorgias Press in 2009 offered a new postscript that takes account of the Lucullan scholarship that appeared in the seventeen years since the original printing (this second edition reprints the main body of the 1992 work without edit).

Keaveney’s book is a masterful treatment of a complicated time and a difficult life. It is aimed at a scholarly audience, with extensive documentation of sources both primary and secondary. Keaveney’s work assumes a certain familiarity with the history of the Roman Republic, in particular the political and domestic challenges of the first half of the first century BC. It seeks to offer solutions to several seemingly intractable problems in the timeline and investigation of Lucullus’ career, and to disentangle the thornier knots posed by contradictory sources. It is a valuable, indeed indispensable companion to any study of its subject, as the number of references to it in this work attests. Keaveney’s work has largely eclipsed the most comprehensive biography available before it, van Ooteghem’s French language Lucius Licinius Lucullus (Brussels: 1959), which still retains its usefulness on a number of points. Manuel Tröster’s Themes, Character and Politics in Plutarch’s Life of Lucullus: The Construction of a Roman Aristocrat (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008) is mostly concerned with Plutarch’s biographical treatment of Lucullus. Neither van Ooteghem nor Tröster offer the degree of coverage of all aspects of Lucullus’ life that Keaveney provides. It might also be useful to note that Keaveney, van Ooteghem and Tröster are not always easily obtainable, especially by students (let alone the general reader).

From the start, I should make clear that my work on Lucullus does not in any way seek to replace, or even to supplement Keaveney’s. Rather, it seeks to make Lucullus more accessible to a wider audience of readers, in particular to students and devotees of military history and Roman military science. Certainly it seeks to offer fresh appraisals of the same problems that Keaveney and other scholars have researched and appraised. But scholars will want to turn first to Keaveney. The present book seeks to focus more closely on Lucullus’ military career than his political, in keeping with the nature of the series of Roman military biographies in which it appears. At the same time, it also endeavours to present relevant commentary on that career from Lucullus’ literary and artistic pursuits, in particular with respect to the question of Lucullus as a Roman Alexander, and of Lucullus’ relationship to Epicureanism. Throughout, it does not so much aspire to say something new about its subject, as it hopes to make a major figure of republican Rome better known to a wider audience.

But why Lucullus? First and foremost, because among the figures of the military and political world of the late Republic, he is among the most underappreciated. Both personal achievements and the benefit of historical hindsight have made Caesar, Pompey and even Crassus appreciably more famous and familiar to later generations. Lucullus is all but forgotten, even among those with at least a passing interest in Roman republican history. This relative obscurity does not accord with the accomplishments of the man, both in the forum and the field; this almost studied neglect does not reflect the résumé of a man for whom, we shall see, the title ‘Last of the Republicans’ is not inappropriate (Keaveney would confer the label on Lucullus’ spiritual father Sulla). In the life of Lucullus, we may well find a microcosm of many of the problems that confronted Rome, both domestically and internationally; Lucullus’ life is emblematic of his age, and both his successes and failures attest to the particular realities of Roman republican life to a remarkably transparent degree.

Another reason for a new consideration of Lucullus is that even after Keaveney, many passing mentions of Lucullus in works on Roman history, in biographies of his great antagonist Mithridates of Pontus and in volumes on republican military science refer to Lucullus as essentially a failure in his military and political quests in Asia, and, ultimately, a synonym for hedonist and decadent pleasure-seeker. This crude appraisal of the man remains all too common in otherwise praiseworthy treatments of the period. Lucullus’ enemies, one might almost think, performed exceedingly well in their enterprise of discrediting the man. Keaveney’s work was groundbreaking in its reconsideration of an old stereotype that may well never die out entirely; the present volume seeks to expand on that re-evaluation of a man whose last years were a testament not so much to decadence as to acceptance of a fate that was undeserved and unmerited (Keaveney, we should note, has also done great work in treating the somewhat similar problems posed by the life of Sulla).

The abiding conviction that undergirds this book is that Lucullus deserves wider fame and appreciation for his deeds. A student of mine once commented that all she knew of Lucullus was the mention of him in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus. I could not criticize her for the inaccurate observation; Kubrick’s film was the first time I too had heard of Lucullus. And, like her, I did not realize at the time that the film referenced his brother, Marcus Lucullus, and not the more accomplished Lucius. In hindsight, the inadvertent ‘error’ of both my student and myself is instructive and worthy of reflection. Lucullus has been largely forgotten in comparison to his more storied rivals and colleagues. It is my conviction after spending many months with his life and story that he deserves wider fame. Both he and his brother achieved much in a difficult age; they became the glories of their family and were a credit to the Republic that nurtured and inspired them. Lucullus and his brother also stand forth as almost lonely examples of fame from their family; before them, their lineage could boast a scattered sampling of noteworthy figures – and after them, there is almost nothing to report.

Lucullus, too, offers a case study in the particular circumstances and the political and philosophical underpinnings of the collapse of the republican system in which he was so invested. To study Lucullus is to appreciate better why the Republic collapsed, and also to investigate closely how and why Rome expanded its power so dramatically toward the East. It is a story of incalculable significance for the later history of Turkey, Armenia, Syria and Greece; it is an adventure that is both eminently Roman and hauntingly Alexandrian. The relationship between Rome’s eastern expansion and the eventual transformation of the Roman political system from a predominately republican to a predominately imperial experience is at the heart of understanding the career of Lucullus. He was one of the most inveterate defenders of the ‘old’ republican system, of the traditional structures of Roman government and societal management. In investigating his life closely, we may discover along the way that his work in eastern realms contributed to the metamorphosis of that ancient system into what would eventually become the ‘Roman Empire’ of post-Caesarian, post-Augustan realities. In some circles it is popular to speak of ‘liminal’ figures. In the case of Lucullus, the trendy adjective is appropriate. Lucullus bridges the Republic and the Empire. He is a tragic figure in that he helped to bring about a world in which he would not have felt at ease. He also bridges the worlds of Sulla and Caesar, the one man his mentor and political and military father, the other an upcoming, rising star on the Roman stage who represented so much of what Sulla and Lucullus opposed. To understand better the life and motivations of both Sulla and Caesar, one may turn to Lucullus, the almost forgotten intermediary figure between the horrors of the Sullan Age and the no less transformative (and oftentimes violent) experience of the Caesarian.

Lucullus was inextricably connected to the literary and philosophical worlds of his day. Cicero was certainly his acquaintance and, at times at least, friend; the poet Lucretius was likely among his associates as well. Given how today Lucullus is better known as the source of a recherché adjective (‘lucullan’) connoting luxury and decadence, it is profitable to consider his life in terms of his contemporary Roman experience of Epicureanism, a philosophical school that has often suffered the same imprecise, ultimately unfair characterization that has besmirched Lucullus’ own reputation. The study of Lucullus’ life and work offers the chance to see firsthand the delicate and sometimes tense interplay between political and military exigencies on the one hand, and the clarion call of poetry and philosophy on the other. Lucullus was a man of letters as much as he was a man of battle, sieges and financial administration. Somewhere along the path of exploring his life, we may hope to achieve a better understanding of the place of literature and the arts in the late Republic, and we may see in Lucullus a man who found it difficult to compartmentalize conveniently these seemingly disparate aspects of his life. The Lucullus that emerges will be a man of profound conviction – especially in the area of loyalty to family and friends, the exercise of the Roman virtue of pietas – and also a man who may well have been singularly unsuited to the demands of power and prestige in his age. His failure, such as it is, is the failure of his class and the system it had forged in the course of centuries of Roman political life. Beyond all this, Lucullus’ work and catalogue of accomplishments merit more than an advanced vocabulary item that references luxurious dinners and potent palatables – even if we shall see that the result of this caricature of the man is an abidingly happy memory among the descendants of the Greeks in particular, whose lands and people he so loved. The phihellene Lucullus remains a popular figure in the Greek world, even if only in circles gastronomical – and given the trajectory of his life, it is possible that he would have been content with this positive memory.

If there is anything remotely novel in the treatment of Lucullus in these pages, it is perhaps to be found in the reappraisal of this consummate Roman politician and general as a man of letters and perhaps even a devotee of Epicurean philosophy, and as a man deeply invested in certain aspects of the Alexander myth. The Alexander image may serve, in the end, to unify certain seemingly contradictory facets and aspects of Lucullus’ life. We shall see how both Lucullus’ engagement with the Alexander legend, and his study of different Greek philosophical schools and the lessons of Epicureanism in particular, were recast in a republican reality that was not necessarily well suited to their lessons. Put another way, to the degree to which Lucullus was devoted to the maintenance of the Roman Republic, he was also stymied in his de facto attempts to emulate Alexander and to pursue the teachings of Epicurus. Lucullus was enamoured of and loyal to a system that did not permit the free exercise of both his military and philosophical passions. His failure was in part the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It was perhaps mostly in his sense of pietas that he found himself unable to make the compromises that in several important regards characterized the work of Pompey and Caesar.

In an important sense, the present work is an adventure story of the old-fashioned, perennially popular sort. It begins in an Italy that was convulsed by the ravages of civil strife in the so-called Social War, and continues in the mythic lands of Athens and the Greek islands, though not without sojourns in North Africa, Egypt and Cyprus. From there it proceeds to the Asian continent, to the site of the ruined city of Troy and beyond into Cappadocia and distant Armenia. It ends where it began, in Italy – in a Roman Republic that was irrevocably changed from the political and social reality whence Lucullus first set out. Like the work of Plutarch on which we rely for so much of our knowledge about our subject, it is a biography that seeks to understand better the motivations and accomplishments of one figure within a system that was both at its height of glory and in peril of lasting ruin.

For the military historian, Lucullus’ life offers the chance to explore certain aspects of Roman military practice, both on land and sea. Lucullus was among the few Roman military commanders with a credible, indeed impressive record for victories achieved in both naval and ground combat. Indeed, his career falls within a period in which Roman naval power was increasingly needed to surmount the continuing plague of piracy in the Mediterranean. In ground operations, Lucullus was skilled in both infantry and cavalry management, and in the prosecution of siege warfare. To study Lucullus’ campaigns is to receive an education in the complete range of tactical military operations. The greatness of our subject is confirmed when we consider that his military successes were wedded to a keen eye for financial administration and diplomatic engagement. And the backdrop of Lucullus’ own wars is a canvas of battle: the Sertorian War in Spain; the Spartacus War in Italy; the aforementioned struggle against the pirates of Cilicia. The story of Lucullus’ life is the story of a Republic that had outgrown Italy before it could say it had fully mastered even that peninsula.

Lucullus was undeniably a literary man, a man deeply invested in the romantic tradition of Greek epic as well as history and philosophy. He was well aware of the mythical adventures of Achilles and Alexander alike, of the lore of Homer and the Macedonian monarch. The world of Achilles and Alexander alike could not have been more removed from that of Lucullus’ Roman Republic. To appreciate the tension between two diametrically opposed world views is to begin to understand something of the enigma of Lucullus.

This book is the result of the happy process of collaboration and consultation with a wide range of colleagues and friends. As ever, Philip Sidnell is a remarkable editor and wise counsellor, and to him I owe a continuing debt of gratitude. My first exposure to Roman history came at The College of the Holy Cross, where Professor Blaise Nagy remains a constant source of assistance and advice on all matters historical. Work on Lucullus has been an exercise in remembering the teaching and example of Professor Gerard Lavery, himself a scholar of Lucullus and Roman military and political history. I have also benefited from the historical writings of my former teacher Thomas R. Martin. Shadi Bartsch has been a source of encouragement and inspiration in my ongoing scholarly endeavours; so also Alden Smith, Michael Putnam and Richard Thomas.

Every other spring, I have the great pleasure to offer a lecture course on the history of the Roman Republic. The forty to fifty undergraduates who enroll in that class, and in its sister course on the Empire, are a constant source of encouragement and challenge on all manner of topics in the study of the history, literature and thought of the ancient Romans. To those many classes I owe a special debt. So also to Sarah Foster, major in Classics and chair of our student board for Classics, who has provided help and valuable advice in the course of both writing and lecturing on Lucullus, and who has never failed to remind me of the value of the study of the Classics for a better appreciation of our contemporary world and its political challenges. I am also grateful to my students Annie Roth and Emily Blaner for their assistance and help in the fall semester of 2016 in particular. So also to Elise Baer.

The greatest debt I have is to my talented and tireless photographer, Katie McGarr. Katie studied Roman history and Classics with me at Ohio Wesleyan University, as part of her work for a degree in Humanities and History. She has travelled extensively in the territories (both mainland and insular) of the Roman Empire (by airplane, train, bus, car, ferry, hot air balloon – and of course on foot). In modern Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, she followed the steps of Lucullus and visited a wide range of sites connected to his life and work, especially in the Greek islands and Cappadocia. She has also had the opportunity to dine at and visit with the owners and managers of several of the restaurants in the eastern Mediterranean that are dedicated to the memory of Rome’s famous epicure.

The photographic illustration of this book shows but a part of the rich coverage and artistic interpretation of the ancient world that has characterized Katie’s work. Her artistry extends beyond the photographic to engagement with the lasting influence of the Romans on the lands and peoples once under their domination; her insights into classical reception and history have been a sustaining influence on my work. Katie encouraged me to pursue this and related projects as part of the ongoing mortal quest to preserve the memory of great men and their deeds. As the first publication in which her colour photography has appeared, this volume is fittingly dedicated to her.

Lee Fratantuono

Delaware, Ohio, USA

November 2016

In festo S. Caeciliae

Chapter 1

From the Dawn of an Optimate Life

Culinary Relics

There is a taverna on the so-called Old Market Street in Chora on the Greek island of Naxos that is named the ‘Taverna Lucullus’.¹ It is one of several such dining establishments scattered across the eastern Mediterranean.² These restaurants serve as a curious survival of the popular memory of an almost forgotten hero of immense significance to Roman military, political, literary and, yes, gastronomical history.³ (Indeed, outside of the world of ancient military history and Classics, it is possible that the most enduring legacy of Lucullus is in the culinary arena.) The English adjective ‘lucullan’ has endured as a lasting lexical tribute (after a fashion) to the Roman statesman and general. The onomastic memory of Lucullus is thus centred on his association with the joys of a luxurious, even decadent table; his great accomplishments in Asia Minor – from Cappadocia to Pontus to Armenia – seemingly take second place to the fame of his table. This enduring memory of the man is rendered all the more striking by the fact that not a single hint of definitive information survives as to exactly what was served of either food or drink at the allegedly lavish dinners that Lucullus hosted. And the gastronomic memorial gives no credit to Lucullus’ many achievements in the worlds of both Roman politics and military adventure.

A Man of His Age

The present volume is a study of the life and (in particular) military achievements of one of the lesser-known figures of the Roman Republic, at least in the popular imagination. For many students and even scholars of Roman military history, Lucullus is little more than a notable republican of vague significance. But Lucius Licinius Lucullus (118–57/56 BC) represents in some ways the consummate hero of the Roman Republic.⁴ He was a military general of extraordinary ability, with an impressive résumé of achievement.⁵ He was also an inveterate patron and devotee of the arts and literature (a fact that may have played into the hands of his rivals and critics). His travels were among the most extensive of any Roman of his age; in some ways he may be considered an incarnation of the spirit of infectious enthusiasm and resolute determination that characterized Roman Republican colonization and overseas adventure – he simply saw and experienced more of the world than many of his contemporaries. There are negative attributes, to be sure, in the sum appraisal of his life – but no one who has taken the time to study the period closely has seriously called into question the significance of the tremendous victories he won over Rome’s Eastern enemies, no one either of his contemporaries or of subsequent historians of the Republic. Lucullus could well have become the Roman Alexander the Great; if Pompey was destined for the title, Lucullus paved the way. Among the great military and political figures of the late Republic, Lucullus also had a claim on the title of the most literary and philosophically inclined. Today, some might call him a Renaissance man, a polymath of astonishing range.

Lucullus has also been shrouded in relative obscurity and unfamiliarity, largely due to the eclipse his fame and glory suffered in the wake of younger rivals and contemporaries, in particular Pompey and Caesar. In some ways he was fortunate in seemingly knowing when best to exit the stage of Roman history (this is something that was recognized even in antiquity); his ultimate fate could easily have been as violent as those that befell his more storied Roman colleagues. Instead, we shall find that Lucullus’ final years are more closely associated with rumours of luxurious decadence, mental decline and eventual dementia; part of our task will be to evaluate the evidence for these charges.⁶ He may well have been a victim of Alzheimer’s Disease, as some have speculated; he may have been accidentally poi-soned. His end, in any case, will prove an interesting story in itself.

Our task will be primarily to examine the remarkable military career of a man who travelled to the distant Roman East and helped to establish a more or less lasting order throughout many of its more troubled realms – and, throughout, to study what factors contributed to the making of a Roman military genius. Along the way, we may discover that Lucullus deserves far more credit and praise for his military acumen and mastery of the arts of strategy and tactics than he has received. If Caesar is still a household name, and Pompey and Crassus relatively famous even among those with limited knowledge of Roman history, Lucullus has experienced a far less sympathetic treatment from the ravages of time and lost memory. If anything, Lucullus’ reputation hovers today between obscurity on the one hand, and the increasingly unfamiliar meaning of such references as ‘lucullan’ in matters of luxury and decadence. Throughout, our task will be to evaluate the charges brought against him, and to assess the validity of the indictment.

But some questions deserve to be asked from the start and throughout our investigation of this military hero. We may ask why Lucullus failed in several important facets of his political and military careers. We may wonder what qualities in the man served him well, and which aspects of his personality and behaviour may have done him harm. We may seek to identify critical moments in his life, where a different decision might have spelled incalculably different consequences for the history of the Republic. These are the same problems that all biographers tackle; they stand at the heart of the ancient tradition of recording Lucullus’ life and memory.

In an important sense, the story of Lucullus’ military life is a microcosm of the problems of the Republic in what some might call its dying years. It was an age of immensely talented men of arms, public speakers and indeed literary and poetic voices. It was a time of extraordinary expansion of the borders of the Roman world, of consolidation of gains and testing of new relations with foreign neighbours. It was an age of massive internal upheaval and turmoil, not least because of the eruption of the Spartacus slave war in Italy. For many of the more troubled and controversial periods in question, Lucullus was blessed to be far off in Asia. It is possible he stayed there too long – and equally possible that he did not stay long enough. Lucullus remains an enigma, though an enigma we do well to investigate closely. Along the way, we may discover some useful insights into the slow and inexorable collapse of a political and military system that had long ago outgrown the borders of the Italian peninsula.

Lucullus’ life is reasonably well documented in surviving literature, though significant problems of interpretation of the evidence remain. We shall see that we are not able to be certain of the definitive chronology of select key events in Lucullus’ life, or of the motivation and rationale behind several important twists of fate. These difficulties, however, are relatively minor and do not impede an appreciation and better understanding of this quintessential late republican life.

Military Acumen

The main focus of the present work is on Lucullus’ military achievements, most notably the conduct and prosecution of his wars against both Mithridates of Pontus and Tigranes of Armenia. It will be demonstrated that Lucullus was one of the finest military commanders of his age, a strategist and tactician of immense talent and ability, a versatile leader in the business of combat operations on both land and sea – indeed, perhaps the finest ‘amphibious’ commander in Roman military history, with only Pompey for serious rival. The Lucullus of military history will emerge as an underappreciated master of Roman military science, a general whose diplomatic skills were equally honed and finessed in the course of the long wars in the Roman East. And, we shall see, in terms of the lasting import of Lucullus’ work, the disposition of affairs beyond the Bosporus and the Euphrates for years to come would largely be the result of the achievements won by this protégé of Sulla.

Names and Origins

We may begin – as so often in the study of Roman personages – with names. ‘Lucius’ is one of the relatively few Roman ‘first names’ or praenomina; it is derived from the Latin noun lux, ‘light’ (and so our title ‘from the dawn of an optimate life’ for our subject). The nomen ‘Licinius’ refers to the clan or gens ‘Licinia’, a plebeian gens whose origins may have been Etruscan.⁷ ‘Lucullus’ is a cognomen, the third part of a Roman name that referred to a particular family. Some Romans are more commonly known today by their nomen (cf. Virgil, Ovid), and others by their cognomen (e.g., Cicero). Lucullus is in this latter category. Besides the Luculli, the Licinian clan could also boast the Crassi, the most famous of whom was Marcus Licinius Crassus (c. 115–53 BC), Lucullus’ almost exact contemporary – and another Roman who would find adventure in the East (with rather more fatal consequences).

Lucullus was, strictly speaking, a plebeian – as were Crassus and Pompey. But as we shall see, many noble plebeians were more akin to traditional patricians in their political dealings than to the plebs or ‘common people’. Conversely, while Gaius Julius Caesar was a patrician (and one who could boast descent